It's part of the job. I was working on a mission scheduled to be launched on Columbia when it blew up. Loss of life aside, that our vehicle blew up wasn't the end of the world. We just used another (which required some adjustment- orbiters weren't all the same).
The cargo bays are laid out a little differently - If I recall correctly, it was mostly due to different styles of airlock between different orbiters. And since the loading on the cargo is highly dependent on where it sits in the bay, you can't just move stuff around willy nilly.
There are probably other minor differences (I want to say there were some electrical interface issues), but that was the part that impacted my work.
Let me guess, your mission went up on Atlantis instead? Being the newest in the fleet I'd expect it to have a different layout from Columbia. Also from your other comments in the thread, sounds like you worked on a Hubble servicing mission, which only Atlantis did after the Columbia accident.
Space is certainly hard, even for those that people might assume are good at it (NASA, Roscosmos, etc.). This failure is a likely setback for man-rating the falcon in the future.
Doubt it. If anything this is a PERFECT illustration of how well SpaceX is preparing. They know things like this can happen. Notice there was an extended period (multiple seconds) of the rocket smoking before it exploded. Everyone, automated systems included, KNEW something was wrong at that point, before it exploded. At which point dragon would have used its abort system to blast away from the first stage, and made a safe landing.
There is almost no question that had there been people aboard this particular launch, and they were using the newer Dragon that has that capability, no loss of life would have occurred. Unless (of course) there were OTHER malfunctions, too. Never know. Space is indeed hard.
From watching the video, it looks like the engine is running until breakup, which is very sudden. This suggests to me, based on no evidence whatsoever, that:
1. Something went wrong.
2. The onboard automation tried to compensate and kept going in the hope that it wasn't a fatal problem.
3. As soon as it realised it was a fatal problem and the vehicle was lost, it triggered range safety (aka the self destruct system).
If the vehicle had started to topple and broken up due to being pushed sideways through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, then I would expect to see much bigger pieces and a slower breakup. As it is it turns from a single vehicle that's obviously in trouble to a cloud of shrapnel very, very quickly. This suggests deliberate destruction (which is the right thing to do).
Although it does seem to take a long time before this happens, and you can see a piece fall off about six or seven seconds before the engines stop. This strikes me as being a lot. Maybe it's not as automated as I thought.
I hope the postmortem is made public once it's done. It'd be fascinating reading.
Edit: I hear a rumour that the bit which fell off was, in fact, the Dragon capsule being ejected. I wonder if it made it down all right? Probably not or we'd have heard about it by now...
Edit edit: According to the press briefing they had Dragon telemetry for 'some period' after the event. So chances are it worked fine until it hit the water. I bet they have boats out looking right now in the hope it survived.
The large object seen leaving the cloud before the final breakup has a distinctly Dragon-looking shape (https://youtu.be/2K030HRTutU?t=2m36s), so it appears to have survived whatever happened basically intact. (This isn't super-surprising, Dragon is a pretty compact structure with a pressure hull, compared to a long and skinny rocket.)
Gwynne stated in the press conference that, to her knowledge, the range safety system had not been activated.
Can Dragon abort and separate at Max Q? If I recall correctly the Space Shuttle had several flight periods at which it wouldn't have been able to separate from the boosters and / or tank.
